Away from Her

Canadian actor/director Sarah Polley struck gold last night at the Genies, taking home 7 awards for her directorial debut Away From Her. She won for best picture, best director, and best screenplay, which she adapted from an Alice Munro short story about a couple coping with the wife's Alzheimer's.

Polley, only 29 years old, was Canadianly humble in her acceptance speech for best director: "The ridiculousness of me winning in this category is not lost on me. This is totally absurd."


Her stars, Gordon Pinsett and Julie Christie as the aging couple, took home the top acting awards. The film itself is more the husband's story than the wife's, though in the first half, Fiona is still cognizant enough often enough to understand what's happening to her. The strength of will that it takes her to decide it's time for her to enter a care facility is doubled when she turns down Grant's appeal "Don't go," as they pull up to the building, then writes him a note when he lingers: "Go now. I love you. Go now."

For a first film, there are some brave choices, including a broken timeline for the first half the film, presumably to evoke the jigsaw mind of someone entering the early stages of Alzheimers. There are many beautiful moments in the film, taking advantage of the Canadian landscape, but my favourite moment is indoors: one of the patients, a former play-by-play announcer, walking through the hall, dictates Gordon Pinsett's weeping heartbreak by the elevator.

Polley's been busy with acting roles (including Abigail Adams in USA network's John Adams miniseries airing later this month), but it's reasonable to assume these awards will give her the confidence and clout to move forward with another directing project. She'll have a lot more eyes following her for this one.

The Man Who Knew Too Much

Watched this classic Hitchcock film last night and was frustrated by the blatant passive nature of the main female character in the film. The story is of a husband and wife travelling in Morocco with their young son, and through a series of events, the son is kidnapped.

Jimmy Stewart is the husband and Doris Day the wife. He's a doctor, she's a semi-retired singer. At every turn, he gets to make all the decisions and take all the action.


The classic is when Stewart's character, Dr. McKenna, gives his wife Jo a couple of sedatives before telling her their son has been kidnapped. "You know how you get," he says. And sure enough, she goes hysterical in his arms.

Then she's comatose as he does the initial investigation, and he has to drag her out of her stupor to take her from Morocco to London. She gets hysterical again at Scotland Yard.

When Dr. McKenna runs off to look for the boy, Jo is pointed in the right direction by a male guest, but once she arrives at the alternate location, she doesn't actually do anything - she just calls her husband.

Once they're together again, it's the good doctor who again comes up with the plan for her to leave and call the cops. When the cops arrive however, she's locked out of the building, powerless to do anything.

At the turning point of the film, she screams to distract the assassin, but it's Jimmy who gets to fight him. Then, in the final climax where they rescue the boy, it's once again Jimmy with the plan: she gets to sing, while he goes to rescue their son. He knocks down the door, then knocks the bad guy downstairs.

Meanwhile, the female kidnapper is tough for most of the movie, but in the last moments, is given a maternal instinct to protect the boy.

It would be interesting to trace female characters through Hitchcock's work. In To Catch a Thief, for example, the female figures drive the action, and one is the thief in question. I haven't seen Marnie, but it too revolves around a female thief. It's on this week on TCM, so I'll have a chance to check it out and report!

Cody, Oliver, Jenkins

Congratulations to Diablo Cody for winning the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Her acceptance speech was gracious and sincere, and I wish her well following up all the hype with her next project. And even she admits that a lot of her recognition has come from "the cheesy backstory" of her research as a stripper. I'm hoping her new description in news articles will be "Oscar winner Diablo Cody" rather than "stripper-turned-screenwriter" Diablo Cody.

I actually thought Nancy Oliver's script and story for Lars and the Real Girl was more compelling and moving. For me, the characters in Lars were more emotionally nuanced than those in Juno. Ryan Gosling should have been nominated for best actor for his performance in the title role. And two great women help him move through the emotional and psychological box he gets trapped in. Lars' sister-in-law (Emily Mortimer) literally tackles him to get him to come out of his shell, and the doctor, played by the ever-wonderful Patricia Clarkson, who works with Lars, but also with Lars's brother Gus, to help him try to understand what Lars is going through, and come to terms with his own role in the family history.

Scene from Lars & the Real Girl

Of the three original screenplays written by women, the characters in The Savages are the least emotional accessible, though they are dealing with the painful life moment of placing a dying, demented loved one in a nursing home. Of course Hoffman and Linney are terrific in their roles, and the dialogue and situations do feel very "real," compared to some of the more playful moments in Lars and Juno.

The National Board of Review agrees with me - they awarded Oliver best original screenplay. The WGA, while also nominating Oliver and Jenkins, also went with Cody. Jenkins took home the Indie Spirit award.

Cody is not resting on her laurels. She's writing a television series for Showtime called The United States of Tara, about a woman with an identity disorder. Her film Jennifer's Body, about a demon-possessed cheerleader, is in production, and Universal has bought another script. Jenkins hasn't reported what she's working on next, though she hopes that it's not another nine year process between films.

After writing Lars, Oliver wrote and produced several of the complex tales that made up Six Feet Under. She's now working with Alan Ball on his new series True Blood, about a mind-reading bartender and her dealings with vampires, based on the novels by Charlaine Harris.

And while it's great to celebrate the women writers this year, the reality is that only 20% of the WGA's film members are women. And only 3 women have been nominated for directing in the history of the Academy Awards (Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation, Jane Campion for The Piano and Lina Wertmuller for Seven Beauties).

What's been great is the mutual respect among the nominees. From Cody's speech:
I especially want to thank my fellow nominees because I worship you guys and I'm learning from you every day.

Having these nominees and winners helps women filmmakers out there learn that it's possible.

Women who Shone at Sundance

Women directors picked up several of the top prizes at Sundance this year, and others picked up distribution deals.

Courtney Hunt's Frozen River won the Grand Jury Prize for Drama. Reviews for the film about smuggling illegal immigrants describe it as a "powerful must-see film" and domestic rights were purchased by Sony Classics.

Courtney Hunt celebrates with her Strong Female Lead Melissa Leo

Tia Lessin and her husband Carl Deal won the Grand Jury Prize - Documentary for Trouble the Water, their documentation of their first-hand experience of the New Orleans flooding.

Nanette Burstein's American Teen won the Directing Award for Documentary, and Paramount picked it up for $1 million. Burstein's first film On the Ropes had won Special Jury Prize for Documentary in 1997, and went on to be nominated for an Oscar. This year Lisa F. Jackson garnered that Special Jury Prize: Documentary for her hard-hitting The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo.

Meanwhile, in the World Cinema category, Anna Melikyan won the Drama Directing award for Mermaid, a dreamy fairy tale set in Moscow. Mermaid was the only Russian film at the festival. Irena Dol won for WC Documentary Editing of Pietra Brettkelly's The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins.

Although it didn't win any awards, Sugar, by Anna Boden with partner Ryan Fleck from Half-Nelson, was one of the most popular dramatic films, for its story of Dominican immigrants and their baseball star dreams. I was going to say it was probably the only film to get coverage at MLB.com, but Susan Koch's documentary Kicking It, about the Homeless World Cup, will be broadcast and distributed by ESPN.

Marina Zenovich made a splash with her documentary Wanted and Desired about the controversial filmmaker Roman Polanski. She cut two separate deals with Weinstein and HBO for distribution. A very different documentary Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North was purchased by PBS for its POV series. The film covers a trip taken by filmmaker Katrina Browne and extended family members, decendants of trade dealers, tracing the slave trade.

The comedy Hamlet 2, co-written by Pam Brady (South Park, Hot Rod) and director Andy Fleming, was snapped up by Focus for $10 mill in the biggest deal at the festival.

Japanese filmmaker Aiko Nagatsu won one of three Sundance/NHK International Filmmaker Awards for her film Apoptosis. Nagatsu received $10,000 and NHK's purchase of Japanese television broadcast rights. She'll also get help from the Sundance Institute for further financing and distribution.

125 features were selected (from 3,600 submitted!) for the 2008 Sundance festival. Of these, exactly one in five (25) were directed/co-directed by women. Nine more had a woman writer. However, 18 of the 32 films that were in competition had a woman as director (16) or writer (14). Of these, the great majority were documentaries. Only Hunt's Frozen River and Melikyan's Mermaid were in drama categories.

Oscar nominations 2008

My friend Movie Moxie has several breakdowns of the Oscar noms. Congrats to the four female screenwriters!

As promised Monday, here is a list of the roles that earned nominations for the men and the women. For my description, I've tried to list their roles in order of dominance in the plot (or as far as I can tell from plot summaries of the films I haven't yet seen).

Performance by an actor in a leading role
(2 heroes, 2 anti-heroes, 2 pseudo-cops, 1 lawyer, 1 businessman, 2 family roles)
George Clooney in Michael Clayton - Attorney, fixer, and avenger
Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood - Miner, business owner
Johnny Depp in Sweeney Todd - Murderer, barber, widower, father
Tommy Lee Jones in In the Valley of Elah - Investigator, father, veteran
Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises - Bodyguard, hero

Performance by an actor in a supporting role
(2 criminals, 1 secret agent, 1 lawyer, 1 family figure)
Casey Affleck in The Assassination of Jesse James - Criminal
Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men - Assassin
Philip Seymour Hoffman in Charlie Wilson's War - CIA agent
Hal Holbrook in Into the Wild - Avuncular figure
Tom Wilkinson in Michael Clayton - Attorney


Performance by an actress in a leading role
(1 world leader, 1 pop culture figure, 1 student, 3 family roles)
Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth: The Golden Age - Queen
Julie Christie in Away from Her - Wife, love interest
Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose - Singer
Laura Linney in The Savages - Sister, daughter, writer
Ellen Page in Juno - Pregnant Teen student, daughter, love interest

Performance by an actress in a supporting role
(1 pop culture figure, 1 lawyer, 1 writer, 3 family roles)
Cate Blanchett in I'm Not There - Singer
Ruby Dee in American Gangster - Mother
Saoirse Ronan in Atonement - Writer, sister
Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone - Mother, thief
Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton - Chief Counsel

The Year the Women Went

The docu-drama show The Week the Women Went airs tonight on CBC, taken from a BBC show of the same title. It will look at what happens when all the women in a town abandon their posts and it's only the men left to run things. While the results of this experiment remain to be seen, a similar trend is playing out on the big screen right now.

I first noticed it in No Country for Old Men and Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, seen over the course of a single weekend. Although Devil includes a woman who comes between the brothers, she appears in only a few of the bloody testosterone-driven scenes. I thought No Country was barren of women, but that was before I saw There Will Be Blood this weekend, where females of any age are on the screen for maybe 10 of its 158 minutes. (A sharp contrast to Elizabeth Taylor's role in an oil epic from 50 years ago, Giant).

No Country and Blood are considered near-locks for Best Picture and Best Director in tomorrow's Oscar nominations, and Devil's Lumet will likely get a nod for director. Other Best Picture/Director nom favourites are Atonement, Michael Clayton and one of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Juno, Sweeney Todd, Into the Wild, and American Gangster.

Of course, male-dominated story lines are not a new phenom. As recently as 2005, ensemble piece Crash had to beat Capote, Brokeback, Munich and Good Night/Good Luck. But consider 2000, where SFLs like activist Erin Brockovich and the flying fighters of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon were front-and-centre, along with the softer heroine of Chocolat.

The biggest female this year is of course strong female teen Juno, but even the perceived "period chick flick" Atonement spends at least half of the film in a men-only war zone.

So what else is out there right now?
American Gangster = male cop vs. patriarchal mafia head
I am Legend = I am Will Smith for about 85% of the film.
National Treasure = Man on a Mission with a bit of help from the ex-girlfriend and ex-wife
Bucket List = Old Men Bonding
Into the Wild = One Man vs Nature
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly = Man Alone in His Head, and Overcoming Odds
Lars and the Real Girl = Man who can't handle real women, so romances a blow-up doll

One film I wouldn't place in this category is Eastern Promises. Although the focus is definitely on the male world of a crime family, it is Anna, the midwife, who is the catalyst for the story, who pieces together the tragedy of what happened to the mother of an abandoned baby girl, and what is happening to other women like her, lured from Eastern European countries. One clue that Anna is significant is that she appears on the poster.

There are a few other films with one woman with decent screen time (i.e. eligible for supporting actress):
Michael Clayton = Man out to avenge the death of another man has to take on female Bad Gal (Tilda Swinton)
Sweeney Todd = Singing Vengeful Murderer with a daughter (Helena Bonham Carter)
Charlie Wilson's War = Man who colludes with men to support men's wars - abetted and abedded by wealthy Texas woman (Julia Roberts)
I'm Not There = Experimental bio-pic of Man with inspired choice to use Cate Blanchett in one of the iterations of Dylan

As discussed in my coverage of awards season, there are foreign films like 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Persepolis that tell the stories of women. And smaller films like The Savages, Across the Universe, Away from Her or The Great Debaters, and at the other end of the spectrum, thrillers like Cloverfield, have balanced casts.

And then of course there are "chick flicks" like 27 Dresses, P.S. I Love You, or even the more elevated Broken English, which aren't usually about chicks achieving or even bonding, but about chicks on the path to get over one man and on to another.

So what's a female lead to do? Take a part in something like Mad Money and hope it doesn't suck? Act in and hope someone goes to see it? Go over to television? Write and direct your own film and hope that someone doesn't kill you because he's "having a bad day"?

I'll take a look at what roles are out there for women to play, after the nominations for best actress are reported.

Awards Season

Awards season pulls me back in!

The Golden Globes were announced rather than gala-ed last night, due to the Writer's Strike. Will the studios actually be so stubborn/greedy as to hold out to cancel Christmas The Oscars? (Academy board member Tom Hanks has urged the studios to get back to the negotiating table so that won't happen, but go ahead Dick Zanuck, blame it on the writers)

I was disappointed of course to see that Diablo Cody (Juno - pictured at left) lost out to the Coen Brothers (No Country for Women Old Men) for best screenplay. In most other awards, these two films are not in competition as No Country is an adaptation. In Best Musical/Comedy, Julie Taymor was up for Across the Universe but lost to Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd.

The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures had given Cody's script a tie with another female screenwriter Nancy Oliver for Lars and the Real Girl. They had also recognized Canadian Sarah Polley's Away from Her, Tamara Jenkins' The Savages, Mira Nair's The Namesake, and the late Adrienne Shelley's Waitress in the Best Independent Film category. They also co-conferred the "Freedom of Expression" award to the animated Persepolis, co-written and co-directed by Marjane Satrapi.

The New York Film Critics awarded Polley Best First Film, for her debut Away From Her and The Online Film Critics Society recognized Polley as Breakthrough Filmmaker. The Onliners also gave Cody the nod for best screenplay and New Yorkers gave Satrapi's Persepolis top Foreign Film honours.

Oscar nominations won't happen until January 22, but they have plenty of great women to choose from, as other announced nominations show. The WGA has nominated Cody and Oliver for original screenplay. Winners will be announced February 9. For documentary screenplay, three female co-writers were up: Elisabeth Bentley for Nanking (with Bill Guttentag & Dan Sturman), and Nicole Newnham and Bonni Cohen for The Rape of Europa (with Richard Berge).

Women abound in the Spirit Awards nominations (awards Feb 23). Tamara Jenkins (The Savages) is up for Best Director and Best Screenplay, and Julie Delpy (2 Days in Paris) for Best First Feature. The late Adrienne Shelly's Waitress is up for Best Screenplay, and three of the five nominations for Best First Screenplay are for women: Zoe Cassavetes (Broken English), Cody, and Kelly Masterson (Before the Devil Knows You're Dead).

Three women are also represented in Best Documentary category: Jennifer Baichwal's Manufactured Landscapes, Pernille Rose Grønkjær's The Monastary, and The Prisoner Or: How I Planned To Kill Tony Blair, co-directed by Petra Epperlein. Laura Dunn is one of three documentary directors nominated for the "Truer than Fiction" award for her eco-flick The Unforseen. Satrapi's Persepolis was nominated in the Best Foreign Film category.

Two of the three nominees in the Producers category are women: Alexis Ferris (Cthulhu and Police Beat) and Anne Clements (Ping Pong Playa and Quinceañera); and four of the pictures up for Best Feature have female co-producers.

Lust, Caution

[Pseudo Pspoilers follow]

Ang Lee's gorgeous new film Lust, Caution (Sie, je) winds its way through themes of subterfuge, choice, identity and betrayal.

When the film opens, the lead, Wang Jiazhi (in a knock-down performance by Wei Tang), is a school girl in Japanese-occupied China. She is invited to join a political drama group and proves to be an adept actress. Her skills as an actress come in handy as the group moves on to infiltrate the lives of the Yees, a wealthy couple who are collaborators, with the intention of assassinating Mr. Yee.

Jiazhi's transformation from school girl to sophisticated seductress is amazing. She fully adopts her new persona, and we only see her once more in her everyday personality. The only way I can grasp her character and the choices she makes is to believe that in the years in her role, however, she comes to believe it is her true self.

Because we know of Yee's bloody ruthlessness, we know that Jiazhi is in constant danger, and must be a consummate actor under a variety of stressful circumstances, including hiding the affair from Mrs. Yee and her circle of friends.

We are all actors of one kind or another, and certainly there is a long tradition of women "faking it" in bed to make a man feel powerful. (or just to get it over with...) But so much is left ambiguous in the film. Does Jiazhi have any true physical attraction to Yee? Or is she full of disgust, as she claims to be to her fellow conspirator Kuang, with whom it is clear there is a mutual physical attraction? Most intriguingly perhaps: if she is attracted to Yee, does this lessen her bravery?

Jiazhi's final choice at the end of the film puts into question all of her actions up to that point. And most frustratingly, for me, upends and even erases everything that has passed before. This is me, moaning quietly in the theatre as the credits roll: "Noooooooo!"